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TactiCon 2011 – MyRealms adventures

All day Friday at TactiCon 2011 was devoted to my MyRealms adventure trilogy: The Staff of Suha in the morning, Tallinn’s Tower in the afternoon, and Descent Into Darkness in the evening. I only had one player who played in all three adventures, but my tables were full throughout.

I feel confident in saying that these were a hit. I’m constantly tweaking my own adventures, and I was taking notes as I ran them, but they were all little things to tweak here and there – nothing that needed a complete reworking.

My favorite moment of the convention came in the final battle of Descent Into Darkness, which involves facing a beholder in a room that includes a river of magma. The party was doing their best to keep the beholder locked down, and at one point a rogue decided to jump onto the beholder’s back. He stayed aboard for four rounds.

In the first round, the beholder was stunned, so the rogue stabbed away.

In the second round, the beholder got up from prone and tried to shoot an eye ray at the rogue (tough to do when he’s on top of the beholder) and missed.

In the third round, the beholder flipped upside down and flew just over the surface of the magma, but the rogue made a great Athletics / Acrobatics check to scramble around the ball of eyes as it rotated and avoided the magma.

In the fourth round, the beholder had had enough of this nonsense, decided that it could handle the magma better than the fragile humanoid on its back, and dove into the river and back out. The beholder and the rogue both took 30 fire damage and ongoing 10 fire damage (save ends).

The rogue’s player asked me, “So what happens if that takes me below zero hit points?”

The whole table replied with “Oooooh….”

Yes, he fell unconscious while in the river of magma, which meant that he lost his grip and floated just below the surface. The beholder survived the bath, but the party ran out of options to rescue the rogue without killing themselves. Thus passed the short-lived rogue, may he rest in peace.

I’m not much of a killer DM, but PC do die at my table from time to time. In this particular case, it was worth it. I knew that was true Sunday evening when some players at a different game I was running said they had already heard that story about the beholder and the rogue and the magma river. When your players are telling stories about your games to their other friends at the convention, you’ve done something right! Well, unless they were saying, “This jerk of a DM killed my character…”